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>scars from the 90s/00s hegemony

Honestly curious, are you referring to Microsoft's illegal[0] tactics to destroy Netscape?

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/04/04/j...



https://web.archive.org/web/20040202024941/http://www.micros...

Also while this image https://i.redd.it/c4izfrkd4jl61.png is obviously just a meme (before we even called them memes) it really does grasp the messaging from Microsoft about Linux around the turn of the century. Dating the meme is easy, that's a first gen iMac visibly. https://i2.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/b...

Those were not happy years.


There's sooo much more stuff, going back decades further:

1) Putting code in Windows, back when it was a separate graphical shell that ran on top of DOS, to detect if it was running on DR-DOS and shutting down with error messages more or less vaguely blaming the underlying OS.

2) Screwing their development partner IBM over on their joint project OS/2, switching to marketing their own branch Windows NT in stead.

3) Bundling their productivity apps together into an "Office Suite", thereby having the strongest[1] ones help selling the weaker[1] ones. (Yes, such bundling used to be illegal; it's actually a legal term that may have entered the vernacular via their first antitrust trial. For all I know it still is illegal in other industries.)

4) Related to both of the above, faking out Lotus and Word Perfect by pretending that OS/2 was the way to go, but themselves developing MS Office to have it work much better on Windows 3.x than these competitors. Arguably, WP an Lotus were somewhat out of touch and got started on porting their apps to Windows 3 far too late... But from all one could gather from the media at the time (and the trial documents later), that was in large part because MS had kept them in the dark.

5) OEM license deals with computer manufacturers that made selling both machines with Windows and with other OSes much more expensive for the manufacturer than if they sold only Windows machines. This was the main reason, IIRC far into this century, that it was almost impossible for ordinary consumers -- including up to at least SMBs -- with Linux preinstalled. (And I suppose this history has led to entrenched habits and business models in the industry which still make it pretty difficult and rare.)

And these are just the landmark ones that come to mind immediately. Beyond that, there were just endless amounts of "FUD"[2] and "EEE"[3] that helped them become a de facto monopoly in PC operating systems (and, arguably, office productivity software) -- "Linux is a cancer", etc etc. (Wouldn't surprise me if they're behind the insidious terminology of calling copyleft licenses "infectious" and "viral", too.)

All in all, back in their heyday -- from at least the mid-eighties to at least the early 00s -- they were just simply the actual supervillain of the computer industry.

And damn, it makes you feel old -- "What's wrong with kids nowadays, that they don't know this stuff?!?"... No, really, I just realized I'll probably never get around to trusting Microsoft again: When someone's been behaving very badly for years, then claims to be rehabilitated, how long does it take you to see them as trustworthy again... Twice as long as they were "bad"; three times? Counting low, say twenty years of monopolistic FUD / EEE / illegality and a 2× "probation period" starting ten years ago, that would be in thirty years. If I live, I'll be 87 then.

Buuut... Given their history as I know it, these current WSL shenanigans feel far too much like EEE all over again. (And, not to be too paranoid about it, I'm still not sure Stephen Elop wasn't a mole parachuted in at Nokia to try and make the mobile phone industry a Windows Mobile quasi-monopoly...) So, supervillain career possibly still ongoing.

___

[1]: Which is which varied with the customer. In the legal business, Word Perfect used to be the absolute de facto standard, but they were probably less married to their Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets, so getting Excel bundled in "for free" with MS Word was at least a bit of an incentive to switch. In the accounting industry, it worked the other way around.

[2]: "Fear, uncertainty, and doubt".

[3]: "Embrace, extend, extinguish".




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